> At 06:01 PM 11/29/01 -0500, Joe R. Golowka wrote:
> > Where were you on September 11?
> <<and the below article by the Guardian. The Bush administration is just
> using it to push through what they were going to do anyway. 9-11 could
> well have been a pre-emptive strike against the looming invasion. The US
> is the aggressor, having attacked numerous other countries. By the UN
> charter 9-11 is justified as self-defense due to US Imperialism.>>
>
> According to this article, the US threatened Afghanistan and Pakistan.
> The article implies that it was bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization
> that committed the September 11th plane bombings.
> However, you offer evidence that the passengers weren't on the plan and
> question whether an al Qaeda related group did it at all.
>
> This is a classic case of justified war on both sides. One nation wants
> something done. It tries to get its way through normal diplomatic
channels.
> The other nation doesn't comply and, in fact, feels threatened. So, the
> threatened nations attacks the other, as a pre-emptive strike. The
> threatening nation now has a reason to carry out its plans.
>
> Thanks for pointing that out: the US was attacked by an enemy that thought
> that the best thing to do in response to a threat was to pre-emptively
> attack the non-combatants in the threatening (not acting) agent's country.
The non-combatants are collateral damage. And the targets used similar reasoning used by Washington: the Pentagon is obviously a legitimate target and the WTC economically supported their enemy (just as supply depos, food warehouses, etc. economically support the taliban)
> Sounds like something that the U.N. would not approve at all. What do you
> suppose the U.N. thinks when a country allows agents within its country to
> use terrorism as a purported act of "self-defense"?
I think the UN would probably condemn it if it annoys France, UK, USA, Russia or China. Otherwise the UN wouldn't do much because one of those countries would veto a resolution against it. The UN rarely follows the principles it advocates and is basically a tool of the Imperialist powers. The UN lets the US get away with sponsoring terrorism against other countries all the time, why not Afghanistan? And the US fired the first shot by attacking Afghanistan (and Sudan) in 1998, thus if we followed the self-defense logic in the charter Afghanistan would be justified in retaliating against the US. I doubt they did it, though. There's little evidence to show that the Taliban allowed Al-Qaeda to commit terrorist acts against the US and little to support the idea that Al-Qaeda did it in the first place.